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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25967080">Greenwood</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc'>pendrecarc</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Robin Hood (Traditional)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anticlericalism, Crossdressing, F/F, Genderswap, Legends as Performance Art, Loyalty, Near Death Experiences, Rule 63, disguises</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:40:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,583</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25967080</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The sky was an astonishing blue the morning they hanged Robin of Sherwood.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Rule 63 Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Greenwood</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts">reconditarmonia</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sky was an astonishing blue the morning they hanged Robin of Sherwood.</p><p>Robin noticed this because she kept her eyes turned upward as she was led to the cart. She hadn’t eaten at all the night before, so as not to go to her death with sick on her shoes, and her sight darkened with each step. When she lifted her foot to mount the cart, she swayed, could not catch herself with her hands bound behind, and was only held upright by the guard’s quick hand under her elbow.</p><p>She dropped her eyes to look at him. He was the age her father would have been, and though his eyes were hard (for the sheriff required hard men in his service), his face was made for kindness. “I thank you, sir,” she said, pitching her voice low as Alan had taught her, as she was used to among all but her own men. Her company voice, John called it. </p><p>The guard dropped his hand as though she’d spat at him, and his confusion gave her the strength for a quick, cutting smile. She made it the rest of the way under her own strength.</p><p>As the cart made its bone-rattling way through the gate, she reflected on the mistakes that had led her to this moment. Mostly they were her own, born of anger and the hectic conceit of success. It would have turned almost anyone’s head to win every small skirmish she’d fought, whether of wits or of arms. That was no excuse for letting it turn hers. The Sheriff’s wrath alone she might have survived; making a personal enemy of Gisborne had been ill-advised, but difficult to avoid if she wished to continue her work; but provoking the Bishop of Hereford—that might have been a step too far.</p><p>The sight of the people waiting outside the gatehouse drew her back to the present. Dozens of them, perhaps more, lining the path up from the castle in odd clusters, faces turning up to her as she passed by. She noted each of them but could put names to just a few. There had been little opportunity to make the acquaintance of these folk. It was well-known that Robin Hood never came undisguised to Nottingham, and even then only rarely; he sent his men to distribute the coin he reclaimed. But now they would know him by sight, these laborers and craftsmen and their families, and he might know them in turn, for all that would matter once he was dead.</p><p>She tried to read the expression on each face, as though by doing so she might read the tale of her life told by those for whom she’d spun it. So Robin herself had carded and spun, once, and might in another life have expected to cast just such an eye over the fit of a tunic on her husband or child. Would it warm them through the winter or admit a chill? (Was it defiance she wanted to see, or sorrow? Was she afraid of finding despair, or rejection?)</p><p>She must have been disappointed in any case. Young and old, plowman and townsman, farmwife and spinster, they watched with faces wiped blank for the benefit of the Sheriff’s men. He taxed them of more than their coin.</p><p>It was but three or four furlongs from the castle to the market square. Her gallows waited there, a hastily-erected skeleton of oak. Robin’s stomach betrayed her at the sight, and she cast her eyes again to the sky. From the crowd this would look like piety, which would do very well for Robin Hood’s last moments. And indeed the words of a quick, unceremonious prayer formed in her head, but they were not addressed to Christ or any of his saints: <em>Where are you, Will and Much and Alan? Why have you done nothing, Little John? Come now, you and all the rest. Come quick if you love me.</em> </p><p>It was precisely the opposite of the orders she’d always given, and precisely the opposite of the promise she’d extracted from Little John. But the cart jerked to a halt in the shadow of the gallows, and the hangman came up to settle the noose around her neck; anyone might have been afraid, and in her head she wasn’t a legend at all. She was only Robin.</p><p>Robin Hood was another matter, though. He must not die in fear. Robin made herself take a last long breath and look out over the gathered crowd. There was a girl nearby, standing beside her father and brothers. She was not yet old enough to cover her hair, and the knees of her best dress were stained a deep and grassy green. Thinking of another girl with stained knees and a stubborn chin, a girl who had lived in a forester’s cottage not so long ago, Robin met her staring eyes and winked. Let her take that away from this morning: a conspiracy of common feeling with a living legend, a dying man.</p><p>The hangman had jumped down from the cart. The man at the horse’s head waited for his signal. Robin turned her gaze up one final time.</p><p>Behind faint wisps of cloud, the sky was blue as a thrush’s egg, dazzling bright. And then it was split in two.</p><p>The dark passage of the arrow was almost too quick to see, and she might not have believed it if not for the quiet thud as it pierced the crossbeam. It hung trembling there for a moment. Robin forgot to hold her breath.</p><p>Then the cart began to move. Other things began to happen, too, making as they did a great deal of noise and causing a great deal of confusion, but she was more concerned with the loss of purchase under her feet. When she fell and hung there by the neck, there was no room for anything less immediate than her throat, the rope around it, and the breath that could not come through it.</p><p>She’d kissed her hand to death before. A hundred times she’d met it in Sherwood, whether slipping from the highest branches as a child or dodging the swords of the Sheriff’s men. Never had death nodded back. She found it a poor acquaintance.</p><p>There was a pounding in her ears, a rhythmic roar like the Abbey bells. Then the sensation of falling, a sudden release, cut short by an impact hard as John’s staff across her chest. Perhaps that was the end.</p><p>If it was, she thought distantly, the end smelled of horse dung and good, clean earth, and she couldn’t tell whether that made it heaven or hell.</p><p>There was a sharp pain in one of her wrists. Robin accepted this with the passivity of one who had no expectation of using those wrists again, as she did being turned to one side. Her mind rebelled at last, though feebly, when the hand at her throat thrust itself down the neck of her undertunic. There was a very good reason she mustn’t allow that, she was sure, but she couldn’t remember what it was, much less make answer for the insult. The palm pressed flat between her breasts and over her heart, which was still, apparently, beating.</p><p>“For Christ’s sake, Robin,” said a woman’s voice in her ear.</p><p>Then all at once she could breathe, though the pain of it made death seem a reasonable trade; sunlight fell on her face and the sounds of melee pressed in about her.</p><p>“You came,” she tried to say, because of course that was John’s arm threading under her shoulders and dragging her up. Her legs folded, but she was caught about the waist and held nearly upright.</p><p>“Hold her head,” John said in curt command to someone Robin couldn’t see. Robin would have protested that her head was very well where it lay, against the breadth of John’s shoulder, brushed by the tumbled coils of her hair. That long braid was always escaping John’s hood. No-one moved to hold Robin’s head, though. Instead she found herself lifted up onto a horse and braced until John could scramble up behind.</p><p>“Where have you gotten a horse?” she asked, the first words to properly escape her ravaged throat. John did not hear them, or chose not to. Her arms closed on either side of Robin’s waist, and as the horse stepped out beneath them Robin allowed her eyes to fall shut again.</p><p>“Where are we going?” she asked after their pace slowed. It was a marginally more intelligent question. Several minutes of hard riding had taken them into the wood, but they could not get far on horseback without making for one road or another, and that was as good as delivering themselves back to the Sheriff’s men.</p><p>John snorted. “To lick our wounds.”</p><p>“Ah,” breathed Robin, satisfied. “Tuck’s, then.”</p><p>“If you can walk that far. Hold a moment, we’ve no more use for this nag.” The nag wore a brightly-painted saddle Robin recognized. John assisted Robin’s ungraceful slide down from its back, then gave its rump a hard smack that sent it trotting indignantly off in the opposite direction. “There, back to the Bishop with you. And send him our compliments.”</p><p>Robin smiled. It wobbled a bit on her mouth. “You don’t think we’ve done too much to bait that particular bear?”</p><p>“I think feasting the Bishop in Sherwood at his own expense, and at knifepoint, earned an order for your capture from the King himself. Borrowing a sway-backed horse for the occasion isn’t likely to tip the balance much farther, is it?”</p><p>“The feast was my mistake,” Robin agreed, thinking back over the tally of her hubris. “But it <em>was</em> satisfying. I can’t walk yet,” she added, after making the experiment. “I don’t suppose—”</p><p>“I’ll get you there,” John replied, low and somewhat gruff. “But stay, let me see you.” With a glance back toward the road, she let Robin wilt onto the fallen trunk beside them and knelt before her, hand going again to Robin’s throat. This time she pulled the rope gently away from the skin, where it had stuck with the force of the fall. It stung as it came free and throbbed with the promise of bruises. Robin held back a shiver as John raised it over her head. She examined the cut on Robin’s wrist, made by her own knife while cutting the hangman’s bonds. It still bled, though sluggishly. When she had bound it, she didn’t rise, but only looked up at Robin, her face a study in inscrutability. Robin had never learnt her letters. Even so, she’d known books that were easier to read. “Did they find you out?” John asked at last.</p><p>Robin started to shake her head, but the pain caught her up short. Instead she raised her hand to the neck of her undertunic, just as John had done, and caught the fabric tight in her fist. “None of them thought to look under the dirt of the Sheriff’s cells. The Outlaw of Sherwood remains a yeoman, not a yeoman’s daughter. Folk see what they expect to see.”</p><p>“So I’m told,” John said. A touch of humor glinted in her eye. She was dressed much as Robin herself, in hose and hood and a narrow belt over the green outer tunic, but made no effort to hide the shape of her waist and hip. Taller than most men, broader than many in shoulder and thigh, there was still no mistaking her sex, even if she hadn’t scorned to shear her head as Robin did. But Robin <em>had</em> mistaken her one sun-dazzled afternoon, at the far end of a narrow bridge. The insult of that mistake had brought them to blows and, shortly thereafter, had brought John back to Sherwood under a new name. Fueled by the memory, the spark of humor flared between them—then died. John was not to be distracted. “Today they saw that yeoman hung by the neck and carried from a battle like a sack of grain. Is that what you wanted?”</p><p>“So long as they see true grain come winter, I don’t mind one way or another what they saw today.”</p><p>John knew better than to believe that. “Did you mind at all that I had to see it?”</p><p>“I told you not to,” said Robin. Her words came more easily now. “We’re too few to move against the Sheriff’s men on his own ground. I left strict instructions if I was taken, and you swore to follow them.”</p><p>“An outlaw’s oath is an outlaw’s lie.”</p><p>“How many men did you risk by your lie?”</p><p>“They came of their own accord, not by any order of mine,” John said. Her voice deepened with affront. “And if you think they would have taken any order I gave when you lay cold and dead in a pauper’s grave, after I’d lifted not a hand to stop it, you don’t know their worth. They’ll meet us in the wood tonight, or not. If any do not, and were captured, we’ll recover them, same as we did you. If any have died, we’ll mourn them, same as I would—” Here she broke.</p><p>Robin reached out a hand, still trembling with exhaustion and unrecovered breath. She placed it on John’s cheek, tracing the dip beside her nose under one thumb. The skin was so smooth there, unweathered and unscarred. “I knew you’d disobey me,” she admitted. “But I was still afraid you wouldn’t.”</p><p>John gave a quick shake of her head. “If you hadn’t been determined to go to your death unshriven, you’d have known what I planned.”</p><p>“They offered me a priest, but I said I’d confess to no man so unholy he could be bought into their service. They seemed fine words at the time.”</p><p>“No doubt they’ll be repeated at every inn from here to Shrewsbury. Yesterday they were saying it needed a hundred men to take you. I did not laugh in my ale.”</p><p>“That was good of you. Did you send Tuck for my confession?”</p><p>“He offered. Too much of a risk; he can’t lie, not so you’d believe it. We sent Will instead, dressed in the clerical robes we kept from that baggage train last season,” she said, warming to the tale as Robin’s eyebrows rose. “He cut a fine figure in all that embroidery. And he has Latin, you know.”</p><p>Laughing hurt, so Robin stopped. “I can think of few sights to cheer me on the eve of my own execution, but that might have done it! I’m sorry I refused him, then.”</p><p>“What does sorry mean? That you’ll repent and sin no more?”</p><p>“I’ll hold no more feasts for vengeful Bishops,” Robin promised. “And I’ll accept rescue when you offer it.”</p><p>It was an outlaw’s oath; John might take it or not as she liked. She turned her head a little so her face was hidden against Robin’s hand. Robin allowed herself the luxury of that caress. It had not come cheap. “Tuck will worry,” John said at last, the words warm on Robin’s palm. Her cheek was streaked with drying blood from Robin’s wrist.</p><p>“Then let us relieve him.” And in answer to that benediction John turned and offered her back for Robin to cling to. Raising them both on her strong legs, she set off into the wood, where the sky was hidden by green, green leaves.</p>
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